For the past two hundred years or so the Western world has taken great pride in science and the scientific method. The scientific method has become a propaganda front for empiricist rationalism. It propounds the neutrality and objectivity of human reason. It boasts of the autonomous ability of the mind of man to determine truth for itself, without precommitments or prejudice. It proclaims that the facts, are the facts, are the facts. The facts have a brute quality. In the end the facts or the data are asserted to speak through all errors, false ideas, and distorted views.
This breathtaking arrogance has led us into a state where the liberal academic complex plays tricks on itself. It has led to academia easily getting sucked in to myths which it then busily cloaks with claims about evidence and proof. The proof or the evidence turns out to be little more than selective fitting up to adorn the case.
When it comes to all human activity, and especially research and scholarship, objectivity requires that at all times the scholar remains self-conscious of his assumptions, precommitments and prejudices. He must be overt about his “conditioning” or his starting points and his biases as he researches, studies, and draws conclusions. This is the paradox of objectivity. In order to achieve true objectivity, the knower must be self-conscious—that is, he must be conscious and overt about his subjective state before he can achieve reasonable objectivity. In arguing his case, he must be transparent to others about his precommitments and prejudices. You first have to know yourself, before you can know anything else.
It is this prevailing lack of honesty and integrity about the “knower” that has distorted so much of what is “known”. It is what has seduced much of the liberal academic complex into believing myths. Michael Polanyi has argued that much of modern science is nothing more than intuition and guesswork. He believes that this is not a bad thing—in fact, it is inevitable. But the intuition and guesswork takes place within a context, an intellectual and scientific tradition which all scientists are taught as an apprentice learns from a master craftsman—and about which they must remain self-conscious at all times. Once they have mastered the tradition, they guess, then they test and examine—and that leads to advances in knowledge.
But this in turn leads to significant and irreversible changes in theory and conclusions. Today's scientists think very differently about matter and the structure of the material world than they did one hundred years ago. The facts are not quite what they seemed—it turns out. There is nothing wrong with this: it only becomes destructive or harmful when scholars turn a particular set of framed data into an undoubted infallible orthodoxy.
It is not by chance that the examples of myths provided in our earlier posts all revolved around a recasting of history. The study of the past is one of those disciplines which is particularly susceptible to revision (“revisionism” was coined to describe the outcome of changing a “narrative” about the past) and to framing. Because all historical study is selective in its data mining and is concerned to produce a narrative or account or story, the risks of getting it wrong are considerable. When brute objectivity is assumed from the outset, the risks rise exponentially.
It is not by accident that the most persistent and powerful myth of our age—the cosmogony of evolutionism—is an attempt to construct a narrative about the past. Data is mined to construct and reconstruct the pattern. Polanyi describes how scientists must make value judgments every day.
The scientist in pursuit of research has incessantly to make decisions whether to take a new instrument reading or some other new sense impression as signifying a new fact, or to regard it merely as a new indication of an old fact—or else to reject it as having no significance at all. These decisions are guided by the premisses of science and more particularly by the current surmises of the time, but ultimately there always enters an element of personal judgement. Michael Polanyi, Science Faith and Society (London: University of Chicago, 1946), p. 90.In contrast to the hard sciences, of which Polanyi is speaking, the influences of premisses, surmises, and value judgements are far greater when one is attempting to create and "prove" a naturalistic cosmogony because, after all, one was not there at the time. The evolutionist cosmogony, potent myth and narrative that it is, derives its potency from sources other than the data, which, in the very nature of the case are racked to ruin with surmises and value judgements and fitting.
Nor is it an accident that another powerful emerging mythical narrative is anthropogenic global warming. If narratives of historical cosmogony are necessarily thick with surmises and suppositions, prognostications of the future must be equally so.
Yet, in time, we believe both the myth of the evolutionist cosmogony and of anthropogenic global warming will be exposed and exploded for what they are: falsehoods. But whilst the hubris of Western rationalism retains its grip, the myths will endure and remain powerful conditioners of our times.
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